"Bride of Dede"
Winnie Truong is an artist from Canada. Her works are large-scale compositions of colored pencil and pastel crayons on paper. Truong's style is meant to question the nature of hair, skin, and beauty as a whole. It is also a comment on portraiture. In the work, "Bride of Dede," the skin and hair are handled with the same long, exact, strokes with multitudes of underlying colors. The small bubble-like cysts almost cover the body in beautifully lain groups, and treated in the same way that "beautiful" objects like beads, berries, or grapes might be. I believe this is a comment on the illusion of beauty and our perception of "imperfection." Using what would be a horrific skin disorder, Truong weaves together a portrait using the beautiful and the grotesque, until a work is created in which we have trouble telling the two apart.
Her Website:
http://www.winnietruong.com/
I have no trouble telling the beautiful and the grotesque apart in this work. Just because something is rendered expertly doesn't make a piece suddenly beautiful. The craftsmanship in this piece is undeniable, but the work itself is ugly and unenjoyable. Call me fickle or idealist, or what you will, but there are enough ugly and horrible things in this world that I really don't understand the motivation of an artist who would put so much time, effort, and talent into such a grotesque piece. I don't want to look at it, I don't really care that they made it "really well", and therefore the value of the work is lost, on me at least.
ReplyDelete